It had dignity and character.

By profession a clerk in a Government office, he was one of those martyred spirits to whom literature is at once a source of divine joy and of almost intolerable irritation.

Not content to rest in their love of it, they must attempt to practise it themselves, and they are generally endowed with very little facility in composition.

They condemn whatever they produce.
Moreover, the violence of their feelings is such that they seldom meet with adequate sympathy, and being rendered very sensitive by their cultivated perceptions, suffer constant slights both to their own persons and to the thing they worship.

But Rodney could never resist making trial of the sympathies of any one who seemed favorably disposed, and Denham's praise had stimulated his very susceptible vanity.
"You remember the passage just before the death of the Duchess ?" he continued, edging still closer to Denham, and adjusting his elbow and knee in an incredibly angular combination.